Design for Society

Although design has become eminently newsworthy among the general public in our society, there is very little understanding to be found of the values and implications that underlie it. Design generates much heat but little light: we live in a world that has much design consciousness, but little design awareness. Nigel Whiteley analyses design's role and status today, and discusses what our obsession with it tells us about our own culture.

Design for Society is not an anti-design book; rather, it is an anti-consumerist-design book, in that it reveals what most people would agree are the socially and ecologically unsound values and unsatisfactory implications on which the system of consumerist design is constructed. In so doing, it prepares the ground for a more responsible and just type of design.

Although design has become eminently newsworthy among the general public in our society, there is very little understanding to be found of the values and implications that underlie it. Design generates much heat but little light: we live in a world that has much design consciousness, but little design awareness. Nigel Whiteley analyses design's role and status today, and discusses what our obsession with it tells us about our own culture.

Design for Society is not an anti-design book; rather, it is an anti-consumerist-design book, in that it reveals what most people would agree are the socially and ecologically unsound values and unsatisfactory implications on which the system of consumerist design is constructed. In so doing, it prepares the ground for a more responsible and just type of design.

Publishers Weekly

First published in England, this stimulating study offers British and Continental perspectives on the ethics of design in the consumer era. Whiteley, who heads the Department of Visual Arts at the Univ. of Lancaster, first describes how marketing and abundance have created socially unnecessary products and damaged collective bonds, beginning in the United States in the '50s and in Western Europe in the '60s. He then traces the response of ``Green'' consumers, offering thoughtful analyses of issues like recycling and the growth of a slicker Green aesthetic. Surveying efforts at ``responsible design,'' Whiteley recounts the tale of Heineken Brewery's ill-fated World Bottle, intended for recycling as a brick for building houses, as well as efforts to design products for the Third World or the disabled. He suggests that feminist critics fighting gender stereotyping can influence manufacturers and designers only slightly until the broader society changes. Though the author is not against style, he proposes that good design must also take into account a product's social usefulness and environmental effects. Illustrations. (July)

Nigel Whiteley is Head and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Lancaster. He is the author of Pop Design (1987), and co-editor of The Lamp of Memory: Ruskin, Tradition and Architecture (1992).